


i'll make a home in your gut

by magpiesflyinghome



Series: asthmatic [1]
Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft - Fandom
Genre: Blood and Injury, Complicated Feelings on Brothers and Fathers, Dead Body, Death, Gen, Grief, Panic Attacks, mentions of childhood neglect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:07:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27800503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magpiesflyinghome/pseuds/magpiesflyinghome
Summary: Tommy loses the one thing that he never thought he would.
Relationships: Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit, Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Series: asthmatic [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2034148
Comments: 1
Kudos: 115





	i'll make a home in your gut

The air hits his lungs like bullets as he runs through the debris, the Withers were defeated only a short moment ago, Techno and his men fleeing the scene. His nose is overwhelmed by the smell of gun powder and fire, it mixes with the copper smell of blood from his head wound. The wind carrying bits of ash through the air, his ears drowning in the loud ringing. Everyone around him feels like they’re screaming, but their mouths are closed, and they are nursing their injuries on heaps of rubble. They don’t try to stop him, all of them know where he is going, where Tommy has to go before they all figure out where to go from here.

He scrambles into the mountain, the narrow hallway decorated with new hairline fractures across the sides. The smell of fire leads him towards the hidden room and hopefully the man that ended this all. His sneakers make a soft pitter-patter on the stone as he gets closer to the room, smoke pouring out of the doorway, and for a moment he knows that everything is going to get worse. Tommy shifts the bandana up and onto his nose, protecting his lungs from the slimy and black coating that will inevitably kill him. A cough pushes it’s way up through his throat the closer he gets to the room, and he hopes, in some fucked up sense he hopes, that Wilbur will rush out of the room, his eyes full of remorse for blowing up everything they fought for, everything they built from the ground up.

Wilbur doesn’t, though, and Tommy inches ever-so closer towards the smoke, his eyes burning and his throat getting drier and drier, collapsing in on itself. This is the end, his mind tells him, as he places his foot into the chamber, it’s too small to really be considered a full room, but that’s all he’s thought to call it. Wilbur’s room, Wilbur’s big conspiracy chamber, Wilbur’s big secret; _the room_.

It takes a moment for his eyes to not sting as he steps closer to the fire, and that’s when he sees him; _Wilbur_. His predecessor, or more his brother, is on the ground with his head facing the sky. His eyes were still open, the silent fear still present in the burnt umber surface, his face is broken out and it feels like a betrayal. Maybe not of Tommy, even if he did explode their whole entire country, their home that was stolen from them, it’s against who Wilbur is as a person, who he used to be. He used to be a bright and kind person, with words on freedom and unity, about equality, about safety, about _home_. This Wilbur on the ground, hands twitching as rigor mortis sets in, is full of pain, who’s been destroyed by this world and the tyranny and corruption that rule it with a hardened steel fist.

He can’t stop staring, looking at the dead body like he’s never seen this man before, like everything in his universe just shattered, destroying everything he has ever known and loved, and maybe that’s what the explosion had done. He’s numb, the shock setting in, and maybe he’s crying, maybe he’s screaming, he can’t tell anymore. Everything is numb, and he’s frozen in space, as he stares down at the man who raised him, the man who taught him everything he knows, the man he considered president, the man who he spent months watching fall off the wagon, the man he trusted with every single secret and private declaration. He’s gone, and it hasn’t fully hit him yet, that the man he knew better than himself at times was dead, was taken from the world.

Tommy had hoped, he wished in the most disgusting of a fashion, that maybe Wilbur would’ve still been alive, and maybe he would change his ways, he would repent. They could rebuild L’Manberg together, under Tubbo’s clear specifications, they could rehabilitate him. That reality died along with Wilbur, died along with L’Manberg’s plaza that sits above him in shambles.

He inches towards Wilbur, a squishing sound coming from under his feet, and that’s when he finally takes his eyes off of his dead brother. There is a puddle of blood underneath Wilbur, his hand covered the top of the source on the bottom of his torso, where he must’ve been stabbed. He almost gags at the copper smell that is overtaking the burning that is started to fill his nose, and he tries to take a step towards the fire, readying his canteen. He is able to get most of it to die down, the smoke still overtaking the room, but it is no longer growing.

When most of the smoke is cleared, he finally sees things clearly without his eyes filling to the brim with tears, and his breathing can finally stabilize, he kneels next to Wilbur. His jeans start to soak up the blood, but that matters little to him, as he takes his right hand and closes Wilbur’s eyes and wiping the blood that had slid down his cheek from his slightly open mouth, he can see the red staining Wilbur’s teeth, when he pulls his hand away his heart constricts. Everything that had lead them up today, all of the fighting, all of the pain, all of the fear, just disappeared, as Tommy stares down at Wilbur. He looks at peace, even with the smeared blood, the dark purple bags under his eyes, and Tommy can’t help but feel relief. Wilbur doesn’t have to be in pain anymore, _he’s free_.

Underneath it all though, Tommy feels guilt, feels angry, he just feels every single emotion, because he never wanted Wilbur to die, he never wanted to lose L’Manberg, he just wanted to be happy with his friends. He just wanted a home, instead of being a vagabond that was chased out of any glimpse of safety that he has ever known. He doesn’t blame Wilbur for that, none of this was his fault, because the new Wilbur was a culmination, a creation, of all their hardships. Tommy wasn’t angry with him, because if he didn’t have Tubbo he would’ve done the same, he would’ve fallen off the same horse, he would’ve helped him destroy it, hell, he would’ve pressed the button himself. Wilbur didn’t mean to become this, so who’s Tommy to blame him? Maybe bits of betrayal still sting him as he stares down at the serene face of his dead brother, his dead traitor of a brother, but maybe it’s just because Wilbur never told him, or it’s because… because…

He can’t think anymore, his brain becoming too crowded with the doubts and the actions they did this evening and he so wants to blame Wilbur for this, so that they could be over with it, with this whole section of his life, but he just can’t. He can’t just look down at Wilbur, and blame him, and make him out to be the villain, because all he can think about are the nights they sat around the campfire, singing shanties and laughing, and telling stories, and just existing in each other’s presence. Everything would be so much easier if he could just, if he could just blame Wilbur, chop it up to his mind going away from him, but he can’t, that’s his brother. That’s his big brother who would do anything to protect him, that would… that helped him when everything fell apart. He can’t just, he can’t just ignore that.

Tommy’s legs go weak in the knees, so he slides down the closest wall, the shock, and fear, and ever loss of the day hit him all at once and he starts crying, sobbing, weeping. He’s never cried this hard before, he’s never felt this sort of agony before, it feels like all of his feelings are beating down on him like a drum, tearing him to pieces. All of it drives a spike through his chest, being pushed in farther and farther into his flesh by an unknown hand, a spiteful entity that decided his suffering was the best thing it has ever seen. His lungs struggle for breath, but his throat is swelling, his hands clamming up, and his vision is starting to go blurry. Usually, his brother would be there, swamping his vision, and whispering how to breathe, holding his hand over his chest.

It usually made the attacks subside, just his brother’s comforting presence usually kept them at bay, but now his brother is dead, laying on the floor across from him with a pool of blood underneath him and hands that are shaking. He wants to grab at him, hug him close, and beg him to come back to him. Tommy won’t be able to lead L’Manberg without him, Tommy won’t be able to battle off the visions that attack him: memories of their wars long gone, their homes being pillaged and burnt to the ground, and someone they considered a friend turning on them. “It was never meant to be,” that’s what Eret had said, what they had told them when they revealed their true side. Those words keep looping in his brain, taunting him with his failure, with the fact that he has lost almost everything.

He hadn’t thought about everything he has lost before and the list is starting to become longer than he can count on two hands, but one of the things he never thought he could lose was taken from him: Wilbur. Tommy didn’t believe that Wilbur was invincible, he knew that one day Wilbur would die, but he had always thought it would be in the distant future where Wilbur lived in a cottage, his hair gray from old age and his limbs finally failing him after decades of harsh use. He thought that Wilbur would die at peace, he would go in a rocking chair with a smile on his face because he had nothing to fear, he was finally allowed to leave the harshness of the real world. The idea is what Tommy believes Wilbur deserved, he deserved to have a home that isn’t destroyed, a life where he never has to worry about fear, about oncoming wars, on his things being stolen from him, but Tommy knows that nobody _ever_ gets what they deserve. Life isn’t fair, and they were poster-children for that philosophy, they were raised on it.

Tommy knows it hasn’t, not since he and Wilbur were ignored for their brother’s training, since they adopted Tubbo when they found him terrified in a tree in the woods, since they ran away from home because they knew that the almost six months of silence was because their father was preparing their brother for some imminent battle that they never even knew about; they just didn’t know they would be the forbearers of this war. No one could’ve known they would have to fight their brother, who has been training since he could utter his first word, who was able to beat both Wilbur and Tommy in a fight by the time they were ten, their brother who they barely even knew anything about. Maybe it was their father’s fault, his ignorance to the bonding of children, or he could’ve been too scared to let him stay for too long. He doesn’t know his father, he never fully did, that’s why he considered Wilbur his father sometimes; he was a teacher, a nurturer, Tommy’s caretaker even when he himself was too young to be able to care of them.

That’s probably why everything is hurting so much because the one person he knew would always be there for him, would always protect him and help him no matter what: is dead. He never truly thought about it, about what Wilbur dying means for him, for everyone, for their lifestyle. Tommy knows that he isn’t alone, he still has Tubbo, he still has Quackity and Fundy, he still has Niki and Phil, but he can feel the cold grip of loneliness start to grip him. There was only one person in this whole entire world that he knew him, _truly_ knew every single thing about him, every little fear he had, every little anxiety that would sometimes cripple him in times of exhaustion, every little achievement he has made since he could first walk to his latest enchantment. The person who did, who compartmentalized all of them in a mental scrapbook to use when he wanted to tease Tommy, or praise him, or remind him of the good times when they used to be children of the wild; he’s **_dead_**.

Nothing matters anymore, because Wilbur is dead, his brother, his step-in father, bled out on the floor of a room he built to destroy everything. Maybe Wilbur was right, maybe this place deserved to be destroyed, maybe he should’ve just joined him because then Wilbur would still be alive. He would still have his big brother.

It takes an unspecified amount of time for someone to look for him, but to Tommy, it felt like an eternity. His world had shrunk to the little he could see through his panicked haze, and he could barely hear the light footsteps walking towards the room, a voice asking if anyone was still there. He can’t respond, his throat feeling like it was closed off. The footsteps had moved closer and into the room but Tommy couldn’t see that it was Tubbo, that his friend was kneeling in front of him. His vision was so blurry and was about to fade completely from his vision as he finally hits the floor, his eyes closed and his breathing still ragged. He doesn’t hear the panic that ensues his departure from reality.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! There will be a resurrection sequel finished soon.


End file.
